Case and the Dreamer (6 page)

Everything about her, body and voice and eyes, asked only a simple answer, a denial, and he didn’t have it for her. He never thought of lying (that’s for those who knew more about people than he knew) and it never occurred to him to touch her, which would have served quite well, for she could have made her own interpretation. He said, “I guess so, Janifer,” and even got her name wrong.

“Doctor.”

The sourceless light increased and the blue man appeared. “I’m hungry,” Case said.

“In the chair,” said the Doctor. “Are you feeling better?”

Case knew what the Doctor knew from the wide array of telltales, and that it was not his physical condition that was the subject of the query. But “better”?

He said, “After the ship broke up I escaped in a lifeboat with a rating, a Janet Janocek, xenomicrobiologist.” The wide soft arm of the chair slitted open and uncovered a one-liter warm sucker. Like the wheel and the needle, the sucker’s design is impervious to centuries. He pulled strongly at it and swallowed. It was bland (he could understand this; tastes do change, and the whole posture of his—captor?—host? was to present, not to enforce) but satisfying. He eyed it and had another pull. He said, “I can’t remember what happened
after we realized we were beyond help, out of range, with no reason to hope.”

“You were picked up in a ’belt—you called it a coffin. What happened to the lifeboat?”

“Oh, that was smashed up on the landing.”

The Doctor did not comment, but waited. Case said, “I mean, I can’t remember what we did all those days, 104 of them.…” What he meant was that he wanted to remember them in order, every hour and minute, because now they were precious, priceless, and because now he could not understand why, except for, certain vivid scenes, they were at the time a succession of gray on grays to be lived through. Because this was
Jan
he was with,
Jan
. Whatever she was later, she did not become: she
was
that, was when he watched her cry that once, sat watching her with his useless hands pressed between his knees, miserably, watching her cry until she stopped. Then the days … ship’s time said they were days; and you can sleep just so much and spend so much time in the tingler (had she used everything in the tingler? He had. Oh, Jan!) and then you check the console and enter “Ditto” in the log, and then there’s nothing else to do but confront the other person and you just don’t know how!

And all the while, he thought with a kind of awe, this was Jan. Thus it is when anguish and grief loop back on themselves. He wished he had it to do over, terror and hopelessness and all; a small price for those 104 days, now that he knew who she was. Had been.

“I remember,” said Case, almost smiling, “Jan’s starting a discussion with me about living, about staying alive—about
why
. Why did we keep a log and check the console and do the active and passive exercises and the tingler and all—why, when we knew we were going to die? And all I could say was, what’s changed? What’s the difference, really, between what we were doing and what we had always done? We knew where we were going to die—right in that lifeboat, when the time came, but otherwise we were just like everyone else, everywhere, trying to stay alive as long as possible. I knew she hadn’t wanted to die a hundred days ago and I knew she didn’t want to die this minute, and neither did I. But why now? She demanded an answer to that; it was just something she didn’t know.
And I said I didn’t know either, but that everyone ever born has been under a death sentence just for having been born, and the fact that for us there was no hope did not change anything; hope makes life easier but it does not make life impossible; millions upon millions have lived long lives without it. And this discussion was on the hundred and second day, and the hooter started up.” And at last Case did smile.

“The hooter.”

“Collision alarm, condition yellow. Somehow out there we were coming up on something, or something was coming up on us. It was enormous, it shouldn’t have appeared as it did, so close and without previous warning, but it did, and don’t ask me for explanations.

“It was a planet, larger than Luna and almost as large as Terra. I shouldn’t have said ‘planet’ because there was no primary, but you’ll understand why I call it that.

“I thought Jan would cry again. Maybe she did. I was busy at the console.

“I probed for atmosphere—the object was big enough. Negative. I got it on the screen, and read the range, and I couldn’t believe it. To appear so quickly, it had to be approaching from ahead, adding velocities … and even then, it should have been detected days before. But it wasn’t ahead, it was angling in from the left. I computed the angle; it was only two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away and intersection was a little over thirty hours. I got magnification on the screen … a rocky spheroid, but by radar alone I couldn’t tell much more than that.”

(And Jan had said; “Please … oh, please …” and when he turned to look at her she was standing with her hands over her ears: “Please turn off the hooter, Case.”)

Case did not explain to the Doctor why he had smiled again. “I needed light to make any kind of survey, but out there there was nothing, not even starlight. I remember thinking again that anything that size would have to have some sort of atmosphere, if only hydrogen falling in or orbital dust, so I probed again and got a positive.”

“Your instruments—” said the Doctor.

“My instruments were wrong,” interrupted Case, “or I used them
wrong, or a lot of things happened I can’t explain. All I can do is to tell you what happened.”

Detecting Case’s irritation, the Doctor raised small, shimmering hands. “Please.”

“Or what I remember,” mumbled Case. “Maybe they’re not the same thing.…”

He took another pull on the sucker and swallowed and said: “I set up the spectros for analysis and that’s one thing I won’t ever forget—the readout for Earth Normal. It said 0.9, and then it waited and threw in another nine, and after a bit three more: 0.99999. That’s mean temperature and pressure as well as composition, and I doubt Terra itself would give you a reading like that. And there’s something about the way those nines came up that’s important, that I can’t quite get my hand on … I don’t know.” He shifted, picked up the sucker, put it down again. “I got some sleep then, six hours, leaving Jan on watch with orders to wake me and take her six. We didn’t know what we were in for and we wanted to be rested.

“When she woke me we had light. The planet, planetoid, whatever, it had light. It looked like those old photographs of Venus, when she was first observed, before the cloud-cover was dispersed. The radar pix were the same as before, nearer now, but the opticals showed unbroken clouds. The velocities were so nearly matched that I could trust the iron mike to hang an orbit. I left a running check on the nature of that light. It was white, more or less—a mix; it came from the clouds.

“We slid into orbit nice as you please, and dropped in close enough so the spin was an embarrassment. I set the boat into a tail-in attitude with the big fin leading, and a steady one-G deceleration, which made it comfortable for us and easier on the sensors.

“You can’t expect full and sophisticated instrumentation and controls on a lifeboat, but what we had was good and I used it to the limit. We had all the time we needed and the velocities were so well matched that the transition from orbital to controlled flight situations was made as gently and pleasantly as any textbook tour-boat ever did. I lost the red-alert feeling, canceled the six-on, six-off watches, and spent most of my waking time on the scans. Jan said
she would make a report about the way I handled it.”

(Jan watched everything he did—well, of course, it was such a change from those other weeks; and she jumped to do anything he asked her for; and one day she said suddenly, “Case, you’re wonderful, you know that? And nobody knows but me. I’ve got to tell them, somehow I’ve got to tell them.” This disturbed him far more than any unbelievable planetoid, and he had nodded to her and turned back to his console, glad he had something else to fix on. After that she spent a lot of her off-watch time murmuring into a voicewriter.)

“I set a spiral so gradual and so matched to the atmosphere densities that frictional heating was not a problem, only useful. We braked with it, we used the heat for hydrogen treatment; actually, I do believe we landed with full tanks because of that, not that it did us any good.… We reoriented, nose parallel and hung on the horizon, fin up and the living quarters gimballed over so that for us and the boat there was up and down again. We circled the planetoid in the high stratosphere—or what would be a stratosphere on Terra—and mapped.

“Once into the cloud cover we found that it was just that—a cover. The air underneath was clear, with occasional … drifting cumulus; the weirdest thing of all, though, was that, from the underside, the cover was illuminated only on one half. I mean, imagine a hollow sphere, half black and half white, and call the white the illuminated part. The planetoid is inside this sphere, and the sphere rotates around it, so that even without a primary, the surface has day-and-night phases.

“I picked a number of likely spots and finally selected one. It was a long, narrow, sandy plain, like a beach, at the edge of a large lake, with forest—oh yes, there was vegetation—on the other side. It seemed fairly level and we could land on it with a clear run to get off again. I ran a full check on the manuals and then took over. I made fourteen, fifteen trial approaches before I lowered the gear and went in.

“You have to understand, the lifeboat was no kind of airfoil. She came in on what we called stilts—supporting jets—and maintained
attitude with gyros. I was practically sitting on the stilts at ten meters altitude, and I had forward velocity down to about fifteen meters per second. A crawl. And then there was this terrible noise and we fell over sideways.”

(A tearing scream, edged, stabbing, and Jan’s screaming with it, and—and his too, he screamed: to be falling, to know in that split second that the boat was gone, that hope, born again, was gone again; and as they toppled, that other sound, that other terrible sound that made them scream again when terror overrode despair.…)

“It was a small lifeboat, but small is …” He spread his hands. “There were tons of it all the same, and it fell over and I could hear the hull plates crumpling and turning back. I think the two left-side stilts, fore and aft, cut out, and the two right ones added to the topple and she lay over on her side and slid and ruined herself. And when the fin levered over and hit the sand we were thrown so hard we hit the bulkhead, restraints and all—they pulled right out, they were never built for such a lurch from the side as that.

“It was night, that crazy kind of night, when I came out of it. I was lying on the sand with my head on Jan’s lap and she was wiping my face with something cold.”

(And breathing used-up little
hics
, dry catches at the long, far end of weeping. She’d been thrown clear, right out through a rapture in the fin, and in time had found him dangling against the outside of the boat by his restraints, with his blood painting down the bent plates. She had got him down somehow and then had gone off to the beach with a bit of foam insulation which she dipped in the water and brought back. When he got his wits about him he gave her hell for maybe inoculating him with God-knows-what from alien water. Her response, astonishingly, was to fall instantly asleep.)

“I hurt all down my life side, especially, the skull and my hip, both scraped badly and bruised. Jan was shaken up and for a while, two days or so, I was afraid of internal injuries because she vomited a lot and moaned in her sleep. Then I guess we both got sick for a while, a fever and blurred vision; it is asking a lot of the biosystem to be thrust unprotected into an alien environment, even a kindly one.”

(Kindly. Cool at night, warm in the daytime, clean air, on the high side of oxygenation. Potable water. It could have been worse—if that had been all there was to it. When there was more to it, it was worse.)

“It was at the end of the third day, as nearly as I can recall, that we shook off the sickness and were able to take at good look at the situation. We were bruised and hungry, but we were out of shock. Jan told me she had been having dreams—a dream, I should say, vivid and recurrent: a device like hands, sorting and shuffling cards, laying them out, gathering them up, shuffling and laying them out again, and she was the pack of cards. I would not mention that or even remember it if she hadn’t described it so forcefully and so often. I had my own, too; but then, fever, you know—” He made a wiping-away gesture.

“What were the dreams, Case?” asked the Doctor, and quickly added, “if you don’t mind—” because Case dropped the sucker, clamped his hands together, frowned down into them.

“I don’t mind … although it’s not very clear any more; I tried too hard for too long not to remember, I guess.” He paused, then: “Hard to grasp, and any words I use are like approximations, but … I seemed to be suspended from some kind of filament. One end was inside me, somehow, and the other was high up, in, shadows. Circling around me were eyes. Not pairs of eyes or one pair, but I forget the arrangement. And I realized that the eyes weren’t circling me, but whatever held the filament up there was twirling it while the eyes watched, and then there was—”

“Yes?” The prompting was very gentle.

“Laughing,” said Case, and he whispered, “Laughing.” He looked up at the Doctor. “Did I tell you about that noise just before we crashed?”

“You mentioned a noise.”

“Partly it was the gyro bearings,” said Case. “I found that out later, after the hull broke up and I had a chance to look at the drive sector. You had to see that to believe it. The only way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine all the bearing assemblies—every one of them, mind you—while turning at max, instantaneously turned solid,
welded into one piece. The shafts had wrung big ragged holes in the mounts, and it was these spinning down, tearing everything apart down there, that made most of the screaming. The rest was Jan, well, and me too, and—”